On Sat, 17 Aug 2024, 7:08 am Eric Allman via TUHS, <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
Don't forget DECnet (host::user) and things like some mercifully dead UK network that reversed the domain names, so this mailing list would be "tuhs@org.tuhs". And the compiled in configuration that delivermail used was becoming unwieldy as the world get bigger, hence a configuration file.
eric
Steve Kille famously said on the JANET (for that was the network) uk mail list for mail of the UK.ac decision "its research and its ok to experiment" - the main advantage was clarity of the scoping to which element to look at going to far off faroffia: it was the rightmost element in the token list for you normal people and the leftmost for us. Since we are western alphabet and alrwsdy parsing the user@host left to right it meant in principle the channel for faroffia was found faster from a shorter index token starting from 0.
Ah yes, I was trying to remember JANET but was too lazy to do the research.
Honestly, I thought that JANET got it right and the rest of us different, so that:
user@top.middle.bottom (e.g., eric@edu.berkeley.cs)
would allow strict left-to-right parsing. Actually I wanted cs.berkeley.edu:eric — if that was true everywhere, sendmail would have been so much easier. A major reason for very generic rewriting rules is that basic parsing algorithms (notably LALR(1)) couldn't be made generic. At Berkeley
meant that the message should be sent to the UUCP host (ucbvax at the time, iirc, which from Ing70 translated to "ucbvax:uunet!foo!bar"), but
should be sent to decwrl unchanged. See the book "!%@:: A
directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" for a
taste of just how bad it was.
Jim at, Leeds uni and then heriot-watt wrote the sendmail.cf to dis-un-combobulate uk.ac to ac.uk which obviously many many sysadmins in the UK ran with. He was really meant to be doing functional programming research I think. We shared an office for a few months at Leeds, it was ex English school and reputedly where Tolkien sat out his days before Cambridge came good. Leeds could have taken free(ish) mail from York on x25 and preferred to dial the Heriot-Watt in edinburgh to get uucp. Acoustic coupler modem days. I think has they known, Charles Forsyth in York would have done uucp over Janet /x25 but people sometimes do the other thing, not because it's hard but just because.
G
Heh. It reminds me of some of Teus Hagen's escapades in the early days. But Teus was earlier, when networking meant UUCP.
eric